Hot Fuzz and Psychedelic Bliss

For night one of their two-night residency at the intimate Chapel venue in San Francisco’s Mission District, Temples brought some blissed-out psychedelic fuzz that leaned more introspective for the release of their new album, Bliss. Having gotten restless with their psych-rock milieu, they’ve branched out with a more dance-oriented vibe, channeling ‘90s fuzzy guitars and their inner Tame Impala.

They still kept the rock in the dark, with transcendent, jagged guitars and airy vocals from singer-songwriter James Bagshaw. Swirling eddies of light cast a trippy halo on the band as they ran through new tracks from Bliss (“Jet Stream Heart”; “Blue Flame”) as well as songs from their previous four full-length albums, including “Certainty,” “Hot Motion,” and “Gamma Rays.”

Of course, they gave the psych-rock fans what they wanted by closing the main set with their standout debut single, “Shelter Song” from 2014’s Sun Structures. The encore ended with “The Golden Throne” and “Mesmerise,” also from the first album, bleeding out into a droning guitar freakout that saw the band lost in rock reverie.

Opening act Poppy Jean Crawford offered up some melodic dissonance reminiscent of the fuzzed-out chaos of Melody’s Echo Chamber. The singer, backed by a keyboardist-slash-drummer, slinked around in black bloomers and thigh-high stockings, singing bittersweet paeans to thwarted love, as if Karen O decided to dabble in shoegaze. A hypnotic appetizer to Temples, she lost herself in her own discordant reverie, her body dripping offstage and into the crowd, losing herself to her own discordant sound and vision.